The background description includes information that may be useful in understanding the present disclosure. It is not an admission that any of the information provided herein is prior art or relevant to the disclosure, or that any publication specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
Alarm fatigue is desensitization to alarms brought on by overexposure to excessive alarms, which can result in reduced response times or even complete failure to respond to critical issues that are raised by the alarms in the first place. Alarm fatigue is increasingly a serious problem in a variety of different industries and professions. In particular, medical professionals can experience alarm fatigue so severe that alarms indicating life threatening conditions are at times overlooked, resulting in numerous deaths each year. Various systems tailored towards modifying delivery of alarms exist in the healthcare marketplace. One such system creates alert signals based on information or data from medical systems. The alert signals can take the form of music that is generated using the information or data from the medical system, creating a wide variety of signals that simultaneously pass information to an intended recipient. Another system reduces false alarms in a certain predetermined region around a medical device. A medical professional has a portable transmitter/monitor, and when an alert condition exists, the system will check the physical proximity of the transmitter/monitor. In the event the transmitter/monitor is within the predetermined region defined as a false alarm region, the alert is concealed.
In yet another example, portable alert devices deliver alerts to an intended recipient. The portable alert devices perform a scan to gather relevant information about the device's surroundings prior to issuing an alert. In doing so, they can alter the mode of an alert depending on the environment that the portable devices and the intended recipient are in. In yet another example device, when a user is supposed to pump insulin, the device provides an alarm. To reduce alarm fatigue, the device includes a randomization module that can generate random alarms. Randomness of alarms is determined by historical stability of the user's blood glucose level. Thus, a user with a more stable blood glucose level will be rewarded with fewer alerts to check their blood glucose level. Another system creates “super-alarms.”